Some stats and stupid search queries people use to find this site

The other day I was staring at my Google Analytics page looking at the page stats. I was wondering whether or not there was a dip in number of visits lately because I noticed some drop in comment frequency lately. That and the time between I get money from adsense seems to be longer these days. But I think it is probably just my imagination. The graph I got from Analytics shows that my traffic has been very consistent for the past year:

Page hits per day since Jan 2009

The regular dip pattern you see is the weekend slump. Since there is no new content here on the weekends, and a lot of people choose to sleep in, or do stuff away from the computer on their days off this is to be expected. Still, despite the dips and spikes, the traffic is remarkably consistent usually staying above 1500 and often approaching 2000 hits per day. If you graph it by month, the peaks and valleys even out giving me almost a straight line with a slight upward tendency:

Page hits by month since Jan 2009

Most of my traffic is from search engines, which is to be expected. 10% of the visits however seem to be direct traffic – which I’m guessing is you guys – the regulars:

Traffic Sources

That 30% of referred traffic is actually pretty interesting in itself. Here is the breakdown:

Top Reffering Sites

One thing I don’t get about this chart is why Google and Google images are shown here, and not in the search engines section. Sadly, I know why Google Images is my top referrer. It’s because that one time I posted a picture of Olivia Munn in the princess Leia slave costume. Oh, and there is also that picture of Power Girl lifting up Super Girls skirt. These are consistently the two most visited pages of my blog apparently. Sign… On a positive note, Reddit, Ubuntu Forums and Rootprompt.org are on this list which is nice.

Roughly 87% of people who visit this site never come back:

New vs Returning

This makes me a sad panda, but considering my traffic sources it totally makes sense. People come in for pictures of chix, see book reviews or thoughtful comment threds, suffer instant aneurysm due to accidental knowledge intake and die. Sad but true.

Now the fun stuff. First let’s look at the breakdown of visitors by their operating system:

Visitors by OS

No surprises here. We can ignore Windows on this list cause it is a given. Linux is obviously second on the list, because that’s sort of my demographic. Mac is obviously third because… Well, it’s like a candy flavored unix distro really – so we geeks have been hitting this up for several years. The SunOS hits are all Craig visiting and posting comments. As I said – not surprising at all… Wait…

Ok, which one of you is using a fucking PS3 to browse my blog? Fess up! I want to know. Oh, and stop browsing the web on your TV – it is bad for your eyes.

Here is the breakdown by browser:

Visitors by Browser

I must say I am totally disappointed in Chrome users. I was expecting you guys to come in second, but you let IE beat you to the punch. Get with the program!

Last but not least, I looked at the search queries people use to find my site. The most common ones were fairly standard and uninteresting. So I ordered them in increasing order, with the least common ones on top, which yielded some interesting results. Below I preset you with some of the more bizarre or funny queries along with my commentary:

ass tortures – seriously, I don’t even know how this search could have possible turned up my page.

gasoline and tide bomb – I was actually afraid to google that string while at work to figure what the fuck this is.

i can’t finish my thesis – see, this one I totally get. I’ve been there – you just have to buckle up and get it done

shit I’ve lost – some dude decided to google for the shit he lost, and he found my page… Interesting

disrobing noise – either someone was trying to spell “disturbing” and fucked it up so badly, the spellcheck changed it to disrobing or there is a noise out there that actually disrobes people. Either way, I have no clue what this have to do with my site.

30 days of night sucks – I agree 100%

alyx fuck – I don’t even… I’m just curious as to the thought process that went into formulating this query. When I think about it, I imagine a caveman going “me like alyx… me lie fuck… me search ALYX FUCK”

am i the only one that wants to fuck wynne “dragon age” – first of all, ew. Second, it’s probably it’s because her body model is the same one they used for Lylianna and Morrigand. Third, ew again.

anakin and padme kissing fanfiction – did you mean “Star Wars Prequels”. Yeah, I agree – worst fan fiction I have ever seen. Good thing that George Lucas never made these movies.

anime porn smurfs – I swear, some people have weird ass fetishes. Note that this person is apparently not satisfied with the domestic smurf porn and wants to find Anime version of it. Sigh…

are some young people old fashioned – Um… In what sense? Old fashioned is such a broad term. I wish I knew what this person was thinking while typing this into Google. I also would like to know how that search turned up my site. Weird.

crash human brain – it took me a minute, but I eventually figured this out. This person was searching for langford baslisks. Here you go random internet person. I hope this helps.

diapered anime characters – why do people with weird fetishes also like anime? And why do they visit this site? Seriously guys!

died without a town portal torshlight – I honestly did not know you could misspell Torchlight this way. Fascinating

do mermaids lay eggs? – Um.. Yeah. That one time I posted this Penny Arcade strip and this is what I get. To answer your question – yes, I would assume they do. I will refer you to that one Futurama episode in which Fry tries to fuck a mermaid.

do mermen have penises – …. Seriously, WTF guise! This is… No, mermaids do not have penises. Mermen might but only if they are the reverse kind. I will refer you to that Family Guy episode where a reverse merman tries to fuck Lois.

do third generation werewolves have control over their shifting? – what? No Garrou are not permitted to mate with each other – the resulting metis breed is all fucked up and… Wait… This is about Twilight, isn’t it? GTFO!

does it look unprofessional to have a yahoo email address – yes it does. I hope this person read my post on this topic and learned from it.

don’t copy image or text on mouse right click – I really hope this person read my rants on the stupidity of right-click blocking and decided against it… Oh wait. No, people who block right click are impervious to logic.

Anyways, this is all I have for tonight. I just wanted to take this occasion to thank all the regulars (in no particular order: Alphast, Zel, Chris Wellons, Craig Betts, Matt`, Travis, Ice Brain, Dr. Azralel Todd, ST/op, copperfish, jambarama, Mart, K00pa, vacri, Ste Howarth, Gothmog, Steve/ccrassh, Naum, Stefanie and many others I’m probably forgetting at this moment – sorry) and the few people I know IRL (Jenn, Milos and James… I’m pretty sure I’m forgetting someone else) who keep the comment threads alive. You guys are great. My main form of feedback here are the comments and I appreciate every single one. Seriously – even if you don’t have anything to say, and you just drop me a note saying you enjoyed the post – it counts. It lets me know that people are reading my crap.

Oh, and if I didn’t mention your name, feel free to complain in the comments. If you are a lurker, just pop in and say hi.

Hey, that’s an idea – let’s make this the official 2010 de-lurking thread. Simply post a comment including the following information:

Lurker since (yesterday, last week, forever, 100 years ago)

Your favorite element on the periodic table (mine are Polonium, Magnesium and Sulfur for no reason whatsoever)

I started reading your blog a little over a year ago I think. I was trying to find out why my LaTeX figure numbers where messed up and that’s how I got here :-) I also use Google Reader (feedly), does that count as a search engine?

Do you get spam referrers in your logs? Google Analytics might filter it out for you if you don’t see them. You know, some bot comes by and provides a fake referrer header listing a website that sells certain pills. To me it seems the type of people checking their referrer logs aren’t going to be the type to fall for spam, so I wonder how profitable it could be.

I especially like it when the referrer line is a comma-separated list of URLs, which, you know, browsers never do. What spammer came up with that one? It just makes it easy to filter them out.

I also want to apologize for not being part of most of your data. I block Google Analytics because I don’t want Google following my surfing. :-) Your last few posts were mostly on gaming and as I’m not a big gamer I tend to skip those, so that leaves out my comments.

There’s me the regular Firefox Linux user, but I really have to comment on your bizarre search queries. Those had me unsure of whether to laugh or run screaming from the interwebs – “anime porn smurfs” – really?

Mart, seriously – we need to work on that power level of yours. For starters I would suggest that you KILL 10 RATS. They are 10xp each and there is a 1-10 chance that one of them will drop an enchanted plate armor.

Quest Reward: 10gp, Potion of Power (+100)

Once you do that I have more quests for you. Like killing 10 dire rats, 10 giant rats, etc…

I haven’t really looked at my raw logs lately so I really can’t comment on the referrer header thing other than it being quite silly. I mean, who is going to look through their logs and go “Oh, look – cheapviagraonline.tld – let me click on that and check it out”.

Also, if it wasn’t for video games I would be so much more productive it is not even funny. :P

Well consider me de-lurked :) Been lurking since a few months after I was looking for dealing with tech support frustration (I’m in the unfortunate position of teaching basic TYPO3 skills to the digitally impaired). Then I found al kinds of wonderful posts on a great number of interesting things :)

for some time, an image in this site was the top result for “facepalm” in google image search. For some time, i actually remembered the entire url(terminally-incoherent.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2007/cantremembe rthemonth/facepalm.jpg) since i used that a lot on a forum. And much later, when i ‘discovered’ the blog, i remembered that facepalm image. By the way, that facepalm image no longer shows up in google?

Mercury is quite awesome but I am still kinda scared to go near it. My parents instilled that fear in me and my brother at a very early age. We knew that the silvery substance in the thermometers may look cool, but it is totally poisonous and not to be fucked with.

So you are one of these folks that have been posting images from here on message boards. Shame on you! It’s not cool to hotlink images. ;P

Actually, I’m happy the image led you to the blog. No clue why it’s not in the Google index anymore. It was probably #1 because people were posting it on message boards I presume – it was like a feedback loop.

I know that I sometimes move or rename images that are hotlinked this way so that my server is not barraged by traffic from popular boards. I mean, I don’t mind if people come in droves from these places to read my posts. But if they just grab an image it just drains my bandwidth with no benefit to me.

Then again, there might be a hidden benefit – for example you find your way here that way. :)

Indeed it is! Open source CMS. I work for a local government institution in Holland and my job started out as an internship and evolved into the nightmare it is now :) Not so much because of TYPO3 but mostly because most of my colleagues don’t know what the word “browser” I keep referring to means. But you undoubtedly know all these horror-stories and then some :) I really enjoy coming here, always puts a smile on my face!

Lurker since sometime in 2008
I like the programming/Linux posts. Especially the ones that are just brain dumps, so when you need to remember it in a year or so, you can just search the site.
Rant about lusers are good too.
Don’t care so much for the games.
Don’t know what ‘power level’ means.

I am also one the guys who actually read this from Android, sometimes. Anyway, thanks for your regular posts Luke. I really enjoy reading you, even when it’s something totally obscure for me (like python code or LaTex rants).

I’m doing a PhD in linguistic typology. It’s quite theoretical, I’m doing cross-linguistic research on the syntactic representation of semantically unusual situations (inanimate forces or objects “acting” on a human, humans acting unintentionally) in different languages from all over the world.

I forgot to mention that I always enjoy reading your posts. I just don’t comment that often because I usually don’t feel like I have anything worthwile to say. I especially enjoy your posts about LaTeX and word processors. People often treat me like an alien because I refuse to use MS Word so it’s a relief to read stuff from people who actually share my opinion on this :-)

Lurker since ~1.5 years ago
Favorite element on the periodic table: Si (oh the wonders that that element has done to society)
Power level: pi

I think I originally found this place with the vim cheat sheet.
(people always think I am either insane or rather efficient for using that to edit any text I deal with (slightly more when combined with LaTeX))

Yep, browser is one of these mysterious buzzwords that most people do not understand. Soon after they released Chrome, Google did a street survey some time ago, asking people what browser do they use. Most people said they use Google. Also they didn’t know what Chrome was.

I’ve been lurking since I think early 2007, and I’ve commented maybe three times. Interestingly enough, I think I’ve visited here on every one of those OS’s except android. Sometimes a PS3 is all thats available.

So I’ve been lurking for a few months now. I came in on a search for outlook and gpg and now frequently use “No One Uses GPG with Outlook” to find my way back. Did you ever get that to install in the old style command bar? I would love to see that.

Thanks for mentioning the adsense, I will turn mine off for this site.

I’ve read all your crap since… as long as I can remember (well, since I found your site googling for Gigi Edgley stuff XD). Just often don’t have time to leave comments and then forget what I was gonna say =P Though I like to think I’ve made a few contributions =)

I’ve always been quite fond of titanium, and my power level is 17. I think I need to recharge.

@Luke Maciak: one of your Dragon Age ones, sorry i dont remember exactly when or if it was an article or a comment that had the link, but if it was an article it was probably one of their “Sunday morning last week digest” posts

hey,
I’ve been lurking ever since I’ve discovered the beauty of google reader…, I do hope that google will add a “comment on original site” feature…
before that, I think I might have been called a regular.

I have been a regular since ur first ever post drawing patterns of people based on browsers they use. Sometime in 2006 i guess. Posted comments very infrequently, but been regularly watching this space via feeds. this is one of my top 5 blogs on the whole god-damn interwebs :P

fav. elements wud be oxygen and silver.

stuff i care for on ur blog is the way u rip apart drm and make fun of the slow ppl who hate computers. posts tht i dont care much about are some of the games u play and describe in painful detail, but its ur thing… i just kinda skip those posts, sometimes they are fun too.

I don’t think I am a lurker, having commented a fair number of times… but am I a regular? I don’t know… I read regularly enough (by regularly I mean “whenever my RSS reader tells me to”) but comment less often now.
*shrug*

I come and go. I guess I am attracted by certain types of headlines in rss like a fly. Though, this is probably the blog I post the most comments on, so, I kind of see myself as a semi-regular :). Thanks Luke for all the entertainment over the years.

OHAI, I’m a lurker with sporadic contributions. I’ve read the blog since around 2007 or 2006, one of those console articles probably. Read the entire blog afterwards and enjoyed the IT and RPG genres, computer gaming not so much.

I would say a bit from both categories.
I do use elinks on a regular basis (eg look up some reference material for coding or do localhost stuff on remote machines (through ssh)).
I did originally see this article in konqueror though.

While on the subject of this browser, it seems to be one of the best text based browsers.
Good rendering, javascript [I think], color variation, good shortcuts, tabs.
If I really wanted to I could even sorta have images on terminals with aalib.

I’m now officially de-lurked. I found this because someone linked in The Daily WTF forums to the post where someone sent you a log file as a screenshot pasted on a Word document. I am still reading through the archives. :)

I’ve been lurking since 2007. I can’t remember How I came across this site. Probably either something about MySQL or that post about tv tropes. I love the book and movie reviews and tech tips as well as the random ranting. I’m not a big gamer so I tend to skip over the game reviews.

Also, I managed to get my hands on a copy of Morrowind just yesterday so I’ll probably give it a try sometime.

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